Top Sequoia Capital Partner Roelof Botha To Take The Stage At Disrupt NY 2014

When Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha talks about a company, people listen. Botha has been the mastermind behind funding rounds of several successful startups, with a special knack for social services.

He’s also repeatedly found himself in the top 30 on Forbes’ annual Midas List, which ranks the top individual investors at the major venture capital firms. All reasons why we’re excited to announce that Botha will be joining us for an interview at Disrupt NY 2014.

Roelof Botha has become the go-to guy for picking social network winners like YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr. But social isn’t the only area Botha has shown acumen; he’s brought on financial startups Square and Xoom Corporation, electronic event planning and ticket sales app Eventbrite, and cloud-connected note-taking service Evernote.

Recently, Botha led the funding rounds for secret-sharing app Whisper and Plain Vanilla Games, which makes the popular QuizUp app for Android and iPhone. He’s also likely behind Sequoia’s recent investment in Flipagram, a social service that creates short video clips from photos set to music.

Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Botha was the CFO of PayPal and led the company through its 2012 IPO. He currently serves as an invaluable board member of Xoom, Jawbone, Mahalo, Square, Eventbrite, Plain Vanilla, Whisper and many more.

Botha is no stranger to the Disrupt stage, having served as both speaker and a judge for Battlefield at Disrupt over several years. Most recently, he joined TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Tumblr’s David Karp for a Fireside Chat at Disrupt NY 2013, and served as a Disrupt SF Battlefield judge in 2012 and 2013. Botha joins other notable speakers, including Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter, Sam Altman of Y Combinator and Astro Teller of Google.

Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased here, and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team here.

Entertainment Deals Take Center Stage In LA’s Burgeoning VC Scene

A string of big acquisitions, public offerings, and a pipeline of growing young startup companies has venture investors saying “I love L.A.“

The recent acquisitions of Maker Studios and Oculus VR, as well as the planned public offering for TrueCar that’s finally going through, all point to a healthy investment ecosystem, but there’s still one industry that rules over Tinseltown: that’s entertainment.

“Our ecosystem has been building for the last 20 years and it is coming to a crescendo now,” said Mark Suster, a partner at the Los Angeles-based firm Upfront Ventures. “Americans watch 5.3 hours of television a day and they read less than a half an hour. You’re not going to change media consumption patterns [so] you’ll continue to see the rise of a tech ecosystem in L.A. because of the rise of TV and commerce and what that entails.”

Indeed, investors in the Los Angeles technology ecosystem love entertainment-related deals, according to data from CrunchBase. It’s one of the most heavily invested sectors in the region.

“The infrastructure already exists for Los Angeles to support a new medium, and investors have taken notice,” Suster said. “That’s why you see an emergence of video deals. It’s not just Maker Studios, which was bought for almost a billion. You also have TasteMade, Machinima, and AwesomenessTV.”

Among the fastest growing video companies is the upstart Mitu Networks, backed by the Los Angeles powerbroker Peter Chernin and other indvidual and institutional investors. Mitu just passed its 1 billionth view earlier this year.

Even as entertainment rises as the biggest star in the L.A. tech firmament, other sectors are vying for investors’ dollars and succeeding in getting their message out through the noise, glitz, glamor and razzle dazzle of the city of angels.

Most of the largest investments made by L.A.’s venture capitalists weren’t in entertainment at all. Rather, investors flocked to back electric vehicle manufacturers, space companies, life sciences startups, and e-commerce companies. It’s a testament to a market that’s actually quite diverse and a city that graduates more engineers than any other in the country, according to Suster.

Image by Flickr user aepg under a CC BY 2.0 license

Android 4.4.3 enters pre-release 'dogfooding' stage

Kris Carlon 2014-04-10T08:20:01Z7 hours ago

Kris Carlon

Putting down roots in Berlin after six years of traveling is a major step for Kris Carlon, who has spent more time living out of a tent lately than sitting at a desk. Kris comes to the AndroidPIT Editorial Team via a lengthy period spent writing on art and culture in Australia and other places he has lived. He joined the Android community while resurfacing in civilization back in 2010 and has never looked back, using technology to replace his actual presence in other people's lives ever since.

New evidence points to the fact that Android 4.4.3 has entered the dogfooding stage at Google. Dogfooding is a testing phase meant for internal employees of the company to gather feedback and make last minute changes prior to making a release public. You may recall the YouTube app was released publicly recently with dogfood options enabled and then promptly reupdated to remove them. This means the new incremental update is not too far away.

The Android 4.4.3 update, which will focus on Nexus 5 issues, has entered the dogfooding stage. / © AndroidPIT

Android Police have received some new information that shows Android 4.4.3 has now begun to roll out to 1% of Google employees beyond the core Android team, which is where the first rumblings of Android 4.4.3 came from a few weeks ago. Considering it has only just started dogfooding, Android 4.4.3 will still be a few weeks away, so don't expect an OTA tomorrow, but it is in the final stages before being made public. It seems likely that any major changes will eb held over to the next iteration of Android that we expect to see announced at Google I/O on June 25th.

Android 4.4.3 looks to not only beneft the Nexus 5 now, but all supported Nexus devices. / © AndroidPIT

As such, there's no rumors of new features in Android 4.4.3, just stability and security updates, but many stock Android users are awaiting fixes for the mm-qcamera-daemon problems the Nexus 5 has increasingly suffered from and some other annoying bugs like connection dropouts and random reboots. The update is only planned for supported Nexus devices at this point with Motorola and Google Play editions to follow. Initially, the update was only expected to benefit the Nexus 5.

Check our previous post for the expected list of bug fixes in Android 4.4.3.

Are you experiencing buggy behaviour with Android 4.4.2? What do you think will be released at Google I/O?

Source: Android Police

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Y Combinator’s New President Sam Altman To Take The Stage At Disrupt NY

We’re very pleased to announce that Sam Altman, the newly appointed president of the renowned Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May to talk about how he plans to lead YC into the next phase of its growth.

There’s no question that Y Combinator has become one of the most powerful entities in the tech startup ecosystem since its launch nine years ago in March 2005. The unique way that YC approaches startup investment and advising has changed the way Silicon Valley does business. The results speak for themselves: Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, and Stripe are just a few of the companies that launched out of YC.

Building something as impactful as Y Combinator in fewer than 10 years is hard. Taking that to the next level is even harder. So when Y Combinator founder Paul Graham announced last month that he had found the perfect person to do just that in the 28-year-old Altman, it was a bold statement. Graham will officially be stepping aside from day-to-day duties at YC next week, with Altman taking over in the role of president.

Altman is himself a Y Combinator alum, having founded a startup called Loopt in YC’s inaugural class back in 2005. (Loopt was acquired by payment technology firm Green Dot in 2012 for $43.4 million in cash.) Altman’s talents as an entrepreneur and insightful adviser have garnered him high praise among some of tech’s most influential people. In a 2009 essay, Paul Graham named Altman one of the “five most interesting founders of all time,” alongside Steve Jobs, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Peter Thiel recently sang Altman’s praises to Re/code, saying: “Silicon Valley is full of smart people, but Sam is in a league of his own. When he speaks I pay close attention, because his insights are usually spot on.”

Under Altman’s leadership, YC is positioning itself for growth and long-term relevance. The goal is to emulate longstanding universities, rather than traditional companies. “It’s rare for a company to last 100 years, but for a university it’s nothing,” Paul Graham told me in an interview last month.

Building YC into something that stands in the same league as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale is certainly a big vision. To hear Altman speak about how he plans to make it a reality, make sure to join us in New York City in May.

Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City on May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased here, and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team here.